


Penance

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Linear Narrative, chakotaymakeseverythingbetter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-11
Updated: 2017-11-11
Packaged: 2019-02-01 01:29:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12694224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: "“I was so naïve,” she whimpers, almost disbelieving that someone could be so innocent. “Even after all that happened to me with the Cardassians. I thought I’d given my pound of flesh, done my penance, and then…”"Kathryn Janeway has lived with grief for a very long time.





	Penance

**Author's Note:**

> A massive, gigantic thank you to MiaCooper who beta'd this and made it infinitely better. 'Penance' or the 'Story in which LO Learns how to Spell Pheobe' lol. I'm so grateful to her for her friendship, and her general advice (not only about writing). 
> 
> The normal disclaimer applies.

 

 

* * *

_I cried the first time I told him about you. I said I was_

_Sorry as he held me so close. He said he now knew why_

_My eyes were like searchlights. How they looked at the sky_

_With such longing. And why I read my stars in the paper_

_Each morning._

**_Pieces of You – Lang Leav_ **

* * *

 

 

**_2375 – Voyager_ **

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"Never," she says, and she means it with all the force she can muster. Dark eyes rake over her, searching.

"Dinner?"

"No."

He hesitates a moment in the frame of the Ready Room door, swaying around the possibility of pressing her. She prays, frantically, to her convenient God, that he will not. And he doesn't. That's another debt she has accrued. 

"You know where I am."

 _Here, with me_ , she thinks. _And I'm sorry about that too, Chakotay_. 

The stars are no consolation tonight, unreadable. They glisten, but coldly. She orders whiskey from the replicator - her father loved it.

 _A good Scottish malt_ _,_ her father had said to Justin as they toasted a diamond ring she would save as a memory a few months later, _is the drink of a cultured man_. He had laughed, dark smile and dark hair, and taken the drink he was offered. Breeze, their dog at the time, had jumped into his lap and he'd been so content to play his role that he let the animal nestle there.

It was so perfect, she should have known. But hindsight's a gift that's granted only when the pain becomes a prop in the background. 

Nothing, she knows as she takes a swig of the golden liquid, lasts forever. But she sometimes hopes it will.

Sometimes she hates herself for it, for letting the memory of him become an annual thing - like Labour Day or Christmas. But if she didn't give it its own place and time, and keep it exactly there, without allowance or leeway, it would consume everything. She let it consume her before, every inch of her, and she will not allow it to happen again. 

 

**_2358 - Starfleet HQ_ **

 

He grins up at her, eyes dancing from his vantage point on bended knee. As cliché as it is, her heart flutters, then drums in her chest. Phoebe’s books, she thinks dryly, were right. How prosaic. 

"Kathryn, answer me!" 

He urges, and she realises her silence has been misinterpreted as hesitance. 

For a moment she sees her life peel into two parallels; the promotions and stars receding, dark haired children and domesticity beckoning. Once upon a time, she would have balked at the idea. A fraction of her still does, but only a fraction. And it is so minute that it barely figures in her calculations. She’s as equally shocked by the idea as she is delighted.

"Yes!"

It's a squeal she never imagined she could make, and the next minute she's winding her arms and thighs around him and kissing him with abandon enough to make herself blush. And that is an achievement in itself. 

She pulls back to stare into those dark eyes and he awkwardly pushes the diamond onto her finger. 

"Tell me you asked my dad?"

"I wouldn't have considered not asking him," he slides her feet back onto the ground, though she doubts she'll really hit it for a while yet. "He said something about trying out the new shuttle, and that was most of the conversation. He was quite pleased, if I do say so. I wasn't nervous though."

He's lying.

She knows that's a boon for him; a well-respected admiral, from a dyed in the wool 'Fleet family, welcoming such a stranger with open arms. But sometimes, she knows, her father intimidates him.

"Well, at least he wasn't disagreeable," she mutters, though she's occupied with examining the newly acquired bauble on her finger. His eyebrows knot together, but then he smiles. 

"Do you like it?"

"I love it," she grins. 

"We should set a date. I know you have a mission-"

"I agree," she interrupts.

"Keen to be Mrs. Tighe?" he asks, pinching her behind as she makes to move forward and leave the disarray of his quarters behind. 

She shouldn't be here anyway. The vast majority of the Rangers are single men, and on Starfleet property, there are strict rules about fraternisation. 

"Oh I didn't say anything about Mrs. Tighe," she throws over her shoulder, "but Mr. Janeway sounds good."

He laughs. 

"Not a stretch to imagine you enforcing that rule, Lieutenant," he pulls her against him, stopping her in her tracks. "Doesn't matter what you're called. You'll be my wife. My Kathryn. Where do you think you’re going?" he asks, lips trailing along her jaw. 

"I have a briefing," she answers, letting him slide her uniform jacket open anyway.

"In an hour," he corrects, taking her by the shoulders and turning her to face him. "I've organised dinner for us tonight. I planned to wait, but I couldn't."

"You've always been impatient."

"That's why we're so well matched."

 

**_2357 - Icarus_ **

 

She hates the way he stares, and she hates it even more now. He's been keeping vigil by her bed in sick bay, and it makes her feel like a test subject. He's examining if she really meant it, and if she really survived what she did. If someone could see and endure such horror, and still breathe through it. 

 

She didn't. She's only here in body. And even at that, it's a broken body. This is a new woman - less whole, made of splinters. The Kathryn Janeway who boarded that shuttle with Captain Paris is dead, at the hands of a number - she can't recall how many - of Cardassians. She doesn't like her new skin, or her new sense of injustice. She doesn't like how her bones crackle and how her insides feel like tar. Mottled. Marred. She doesn't like knowing how it feels to be pressing against death and still surviving.  But he’s still here, and staring at her as if she deserves his vigil.

Everything hurts; her wrists, her skin, in between her legs, her soul. It aches.

And she hates that he is watching it.

She feels him willing her to prise her eyes open, to acknowledge his presence. 

But she refuses. And anyway, the pain is too sublime to ignore. She has to give everything over to it. 

When he's discharging her for an indefinite period, Captain Paris cannot look at her - he never really could, even before - but he tells her she was brave, and that he's proud. 

It sounds like lies.

Her father, he tells her, has been informed. Of what? Of her fall from grace, or of how her captain stood watch and did nothing? 

The notion makes her shudder. 

After a week of convalescing, of scrubbing her skin the colour of ripe watermelon, in shower after shower, she finally feels she has the strength to face him. Ranger Tighe. 

"I know what it feels like," he says right away, as he stands in the darkened doorway of her quarters. 

These are not the words she expected; no platitudes, condolences, professions of gratitude. But they are the ones she needed to hear. She suddenly feels a levity of spirit, if only fractionally, and it gives her hope that her smile might be real one day.

He hobbles over to the edge of her bed, eyes the whiskey on the side table. Then smiles dryly, and she knows he recognises an anaesthetic when he sees one.  

"Can I?"

She nods and watches him pour a generous measure.

"Two years ago they took me hostage. I was just a science officer aboard the U.S.S Lee. They kept me for three days." He looks her in the eye, no pretence. "And the nightmares haven't gone yet."

"Will they ever?"

She knows desperation colours her own voice.

"Probably not," he mutters. "What they did to you," at this his eyes flitter to the purple-black bracelets, scaled with healing rivulets of new flesh, around her wrist, "has left you with scars. Wear them. Use them as armour."

.

 

**_2358 - Paris_ **

 

She can see, even from her position at the very other end of the room, he's bored. These people are not his people, though she does wish he'd acknowledge that they are hers, despite how little she feels like she belongs when she's met so violently with reality.  It's hard to go back to what you know, once you've known what the world really spins on. 

An old admiral is bending his ear and his boredom is written plainly all over his dark face. She tries to attract his attention, to reason with him through a silent frown, but he's doing his very best not to meet her eye.  

"Your bit of rough is bored," Phoebe sidles up beside her, champagne flute in hand, and motions to him.

She wants to take a swing at her little sister, but it's hardly appropriate. 

"Do you have to be so contentious, Phoebe?"

"Oh come off it Katie. He just doesn't...I don't know...fit. He just looks so furious all the time."

She glances sideways at her sister. Kathryn's confidence, in comparison, looks pale. Phoebe has a charm she herself does not possess, but she's actually thankful for that. Her sister has a habit of using that charm to get right under people's skin. 

"I wish you'd stop passing comment," she finally settles on, trying to practise diplomacy. "He's my choice, and I'd like you to respect that."

Phoebe leans in, and the faint richness of champagne lingers on her breath.

"I don't know what you two have in common, but whatever the Cardassians did has sure made you delusional," she grins.

Kathryn's rage builds from her toes.

"Will you ever learn kindness?"

"God, no. How boring."

"Would you piss off then?"

Phoebe grins and sniggers, and wobbles off on her too-high heels. 

The party drags on and it's only when she pleads with her father that he eventually gives them permission to leave. 

Justin is quiet, too quiet, as they meander along the Seine to their hotel. She stops half way to perch on a bench and slide her new, ridiculous heels off, massaging the ball of her foot. 

"You're quiet," she says, concentrating on her task.

"I-" he shrugs, hands thrust into his trouser pockets. "I'm just tired."

"For someone who often leads a double life, you aren't great at lying."

His face darkens, and he looks suddenly irritated.

"What do you want me to say, huh? That I know I'm not the right fit? That I know I'm not what you would usually want?"

She's a bit taken aback by the sudden escalation of his anger, and she feels her mouth dropping open a little before she recovers.

"Excuse me?"

She slides her shoe back on and stands, though she's still dwarfed by him.

"Oh give it a rest Kathryn! You can practically smell their contempt. And it's not curiosity they have about me, it's fascination! How did someone so wretched as me manage to bed you? Isn't it nice, Edward's eldest throwing that boy a bone?"

She feels her fingers flexing to slap him, she is incensed that he can reduce their love - and by virtue of that, her - to such basic terms.

"By all means," she whispers, so softly she's surprised, "use who I am to make you feel better about what you came from. The only person here who believes that has any impact on our relationship is you. I don't bed men as trophies, and I certainly didn't choose you as an object of fascination."

"Oh come on!" He throws his hands up. "I don't fit the mould. I come from a dirt poor planet, and family. I'm the first and only one of them to even get a sniff at Starfleet-"

"Oh and doesn't it stick in your throat? You pretend you're unbiased, that you can stand what I am, but damn it Justin, you despise what I am. What I come from. You envy it."

She sees him flinch as the truth rolls from her lips. Envy. He envies her. And she shouldn't find it attractive, she should be repulsed by it, yet she does.

He isn't one to back down, even when confronted with an unattractive truth. 

"Fuck off Kathryn. You think so highly of yourself, and your own opinion. One day, you'll end up alienating everyone with that sense of importance."

She flinches too.

Then watches as he pivots on his heels and storms off.

The moment she opens her hotel room door, hours later, he tells her he’s sorry.

"Bar brawl?"

She points at his left eye, around which there is a darkening bruise.

"Yeah."

She steps back to let him in, "I'm sorry too."

While she rakes through her bag for the regenerator, he bathes his swollen and bruised knuckles in the sink.

"When we're married," she says as he emerges, drying his hands on the white towels, "you can't go about San Fran getting into fights every time you and I argue."

He flops down on the couch, "I was thinking about taking up boxing."

She sits on the low table in front of him, takes his chin between her fingers and tips his face towards the lamp light so she can see better. She leans in, switches the regenerator on and begins hovering it over the darkest mark, just on the curve of his temple. She's done this more often than any respectable fiancée should have to, but he's healed her wounds too. 

His hand begins just above her knee, sliding up towards the silk hem of her robe, and it's a routine as familiar as it is thrilling. She continues moving the instrument over his eye, working her way in towards his nose. He's otherwise occupied: sliding the hem of her panties to the side and moving his fingers over her flesh. She's wet almost instantly. 

He leans forward on the seat, fingers between her legs, and trails his wonderful mouth along her jawline, muttering lowly about how beautiful she is. She doesn't buy it, but she likes to hear it anyway. Her hand drops the regenerator, letting it fall with a soft, listless thump onto the cushions. She watches his free hand as it loosens the belt of her robe, pulling it towards his body and away from her. She arches her back as he pulls her forward, so she's perching on the edge. Grinning, darkly, he pushes her legs open, and drops to the rug on his knees, singularly focussed on his apology. She arches her hips upward to assist him in the removal of her underwear, and he bends his head to the task at hand. Her fingers weave into his hair, dark and thick, and she leans back, groaning with pleasure. And that is all the apology needed.

 

**_2358 - Utopia Planitia_ **

 

"Isn't she stunning?"

If she wasn't confident in her father's love for her, she'd envy the way he caresses the side of the gleaming shuttle. His thick fingers trace the newly emblazoned "Terra Nova" on the side. The letters gleam like silver. They gleam like a promise.

"Right Lieutenant," he claps Justin on the shoulder, "let's see what she can do."

In that moment, Kathryn's world seems somehow perfect, and utterly fragile at the same time. Her stomach flips. But she tosses the ill feeling aside.

"My goldenbird, are you with us?"

Her mouth feels like it's glued; she cannot answer as she looks from one man to another. The strange sensation of never really being with them washes over her, but like everything, it wanes instantly.

"Of course, daddy." 

Her father goes ahead, and Justin is right by his side, and her chest expands with joy. 

 

**_2382 - The Full Circle Fleet_ **

 

"He called me goldenbird."

The previously peaceful silence feels shattered by the admission. And the dazzling heat of the planet is suffocating her slowly, weakening her defences. 

They are standing before an exotic menagerie of alien birds, their hosts allowing them the pleasure of such an enticing spectacle from a distance. There is a myriad of colours, the feathers thick and soft: reds, blues, sea greens. But no golds.

She'd forgotten. She's just remembered.

"Justin?"

His voice is whisper quiet, and she can tell he is surprised by the personal nature of the conversation in such an official setting.

She's not surprised that's who he's chosen, because he is not above jealousy. The fact he's jealous of a ghost only makes it all the more absurd. 

"My dad. He always called me goldenbird."

She feels him eyeing her from the side, measuring her, maybe finding her wanting.

She pushes that last thought away.

"It suits you," he says, and she can't read the tone.

The world's starting to spin, and it's because she remembered how it felt to hear it, to feel unencumbered by so much guilt. Her stomach lurches, and there is spiralling darkness closing in on her.

"Chakotay I feel faint," she murmurs, swaying towards the wire of the cage, her heels lifting off of the ground at a dangerous slant. 

His hands are immediately on her hips, and when Harry steps forward to help, Chakotay motions him away. She hears him make a flimsy excuse to their hosts, and ask Harry and O'Donnell to continue the tour, and their hosts usher them into a cool, dark antechamber. They fuss for a moment longer until he politely says: "I think my admiral needs rest."

His. My. Possessive pronoun. Justin called her 'my Kathryn', daddy called her 'my goldenbird'. 

When they go she slumps against him, and he presses his cool, gentle hand to her forehead.

"Are you alright?"

"I thought I was going to pass out," she admits, silently questioning whether it was the heat, or her age, or the memory that suddenly assaulted her. "How embarrassing."

"They were fine," he assures, nodding towards the door through which their hosts have just departed. He holds up a glass to her lips, and she sips gingerly from it.

"Goldenbird," he says into the silence, pondering, and her vapid hope that he'd somehow forgotten almost makes her smirk. 

"You never speak about it..."

She sits back, resting against the soft cushions of the bench he'd set her on, and closes her eyes. She knows, though, that he is watching her. 

"I did once," she murmurs, alluding to their conversation in a holo-Venice, years ago now. 

"That was really about us, not about..." he trails off, sensing her discomfort and she opens her eyes and sits forward.

"I think about it once a year," she sighs, "but you already know that."

He nods, and reaches out to touch her fingers on the cushions. She pulls them away and is on her feet, and he knows her so well that he gives her the space she needs. She goes towards the window, where the glass is hot to the touch and the sun would blind her if it wasn't tinted a cerulean blue to keep the worst of the glare at bay. 

"I think often," she whispers, "above all of the things I think about, about the choices I make."

He knows that too. He knows that she gives so much of her energy to self-loathing over the many difficult choices she's had to make. But he has no concept of how darkly this one lives at the very front and centre of her memory, like a phantasm she cannot shake, no matter how far she goes into her own form of punishment. Its claws dig into every decision she's ever made. 

"You did what you had to do."

"I did nothing," she whispers. "You know that."

He is silent. 

“And it’s the most unforgivable-“

“I disagree,” there is a vehemence to his voice that surprises her, and it yanks her temper to the surface.

“You don’t have the right,” she pivots on her heels, hands on hips.

“I don’t have the right to tell you to forgive yourself for something you did not do?”

“Precisely,” she whispers. “You can’t understand-“

“I understand,” he says, and it’s so emphatic, it gives her pause and she closes her mouth.

“I sent men to their deaths Kathryn. I sent friends to their death. I’ve lost people…I’ve lost you. I lost you.”

She watches the agony, simmering just below the surface of their relationship, bloom fully on his face. It is grotesque.

“I-“ she tries to stop the misunderstanding, before it becomes so big that she has to tell him the truth.

The truth is so ugly.

“I know how it feels to lose someone you love more than any other-“

“I didn’t,” she almost shouts, pacing towards him. “I didn’t.”

Confusion is written all over his face.

“That’s why I feel so guilty,” she slumps onto the cushions, twisting her fingers, weaving them together and pulling them apart.  “I didn’t lose the person I have loved most. I didn’t. I thought he was but the further away it gets, the more I realise that he wasn’t. And it makes me feel unbearably…”

“Guilty?”

Tears begin to track down her face, and she looks up at him.

“Now, now I would choose. And I think that makes me terrible. I would choose. I would choose my daddy.”

He sits down beside her, and pulls her in and under his arm, so she can rest her head against his shoulder.

“You wouldn’t,” he murmurs. “That’s easy to say, because you are here and now. You’re not the same woman who made that decision.”

“I was just a girl,” she whispers, and the words catch in the back of her throat.

She pictures herself; young, fresh, the future spread out before her. Galaxies, stars, a family, the happiness so long denied her and only recently obtained. And she feels such all-consuming pity for that young girl, who had so much taken from her by fate.

“You’re allowed to be angry about it,” he kisses her temple. “You’re allowed to resent it.”

And for the first time, she really does. It isn’t the black, rolling thunder of the immediate depression she suffered following their deaths, or the intense ambition that her grief became. It is sadness she feels, and pity, and fury, for the poor girl standing at the other end of her life, oblivious to the theft she was about to have perpetrated against her.

“I was so naïve,” she whimpers, almost disbelieving that someone could be so innocent. “Even after all that happened to me with the Cardassians. I thought I’d given my pound of flesh, done my penance, and then…”

She shrugs.

“It wasn’t a punishment Kathryn, it was life. Life is full of cruel turns.” He places his fingers on her chin and tips her face up towards him. “But it is also full of incredible happiness, and joy. Look at all you’ve found; your commission, good friends, the Paris children and Seven. You are so loved. Even if you don’t like acknowledging it.”

“You. I found you. You omitted yourself.”

He smiles, “I didn’t want to presume.”

She laughs softly, brushes the tears away without embarrassment or shame, and buries her face in the crook of his neck.

“You’ll never know what choice you might make now, and that is for the best. You need to forgive yourself, my love, and you need to forgive that girl.”

 

****

**_2358 - Starfleet HQ_ **

 

“Do you like it?” he asks, grabbing her hand from where she has held it up for inspection, using the rather poor bedside lamp for illumination.

She smiles, “Of course I do. It’s beautiful.”

He grins, and pulls her body on top of his. He pushes the sheets away, and she pulls them back over them, and he laughs and discards them again.

“I love you Kathryn,” he grins and she huffs and pushes at his chest, and he holds her so tight it strengthens her, makes her feel all the more free for being bound to him.

“I love you too.”

He kisses the tip of her nose, then takes each wrist in turn and kisses the still-prominent scars.

“Promise me you’ll never love another man the way you love me.”

She wonders for a moment if that’s the kind of oath a person can make, but then she realises that her confidence in him is so supreme that it is easy to swear it to him. What could change that, she wonders. _Nothing_ , a quiet, devious voice answers.

“I promise.”

 

 


End file.
